Gormongous

Just quickly, it's worth pointing out that the disruptions were performed by Outside Agitators 206, a Seattle-based movement that's arguing for the radical dissolution of governmental structures and is not listed on the Black Lives Matter website's list of endorsing organizations back in January, but is apparently using #BlackLivesMatter as a more visible rallying cry. Further guesses at their motivations are probably not my place to make, but it's worth pointing out that the site recently reposted an article blaming the Democratic Party and its so-called "annexes" like the NAACP, labor unions, and church communities for the current state of race relations in this country, rather than the "terminally racist" Republican party, continuing a seeming trend by OA 206 of attacking Democrats and ignoring Republicans, and also that one of the protesters at Sanders' rally has a somewhat confusing cocktail of personal and political allegiances. It's hard for me not to feel like the intent of the disruptions wasn't precisely to cause some degree of mayhem. A change.org petition by "#BLM activists" is calling for them to apologize, but it's hard to say who actually created that, since the Facebook page for BLM Seattle recently attacked Sanders again for his supposed silence while a post on the "official" website stresses the movement's lack of any political affiliations. These are mostly my feelings, too. There are so many protests at which these women could have been heard, especially with the anniversary of Mike Brown's death now upon us, but instead they stormed the stage at a tangentially-related paid event and kept the one person that most people came to see from speaking. I have trouble thinking of a crowd that wouldn't turn ugly at that.

Yeah, there are games where deception and uncertainty in social interactions could be and would be great, but not Paradox games. Every title in the Paradox stable is about presenting the player with a massive spread of information and challenging them to extract meaning from it and make decisions thereby. If some of that information is hidden or inaccurate, it doesn't make the game King of Dragon Pass, it just makes the game harder to play well because meaning is harder (or just more tedious) to extract. For instance, Paradox has already struggled with a similar design choice in EU4 and come down against it. At launch, nations had opinions of other nations, represented by numerical values that were exposed to the player, but the behavior of those nations was dictated by their attitude, which was a partial black box calculated through a combination of that opinion value, the geopolitical situation of the nation, and a totally hidden variable called "ruler personality." What it usually meant is that a neighboring nation with a friendly attitude, high opinion, and slightly lesser power than you would suddenly attack you out of the blue because that hidden value had flipped. People argued that it was more realistic or authentic or whatever not to have absolute knowledge of the factors influencing a nation's behavior, but eventually Paradox decided that giving a hidden variable the power to upset completely any plans that the player had made and was in the process of executing might be more thematic but less fun, unless the entire game's design was changed to accommodate such random losses of agency. Ruler personality is visible and its effects on a nation's opinion are now represented by granular values. I don't think many people have complained, because uncertain motives in grand strategy are overwhelmingly cool on paper but tedious or frustrating in action. Speaking of... Has there been a King of Dragon Pass episode of TMA yet? The recent Steam release makes for a great time to revisit it!

I am the pull-out king!

Quoted for truth. Also, all of these pieces just sound like older people, a little set in their ways, who are afraid of younger people judging them (or even just not listening to them). As a teacher actively working on a college campus (and having attended the "Iowa college" that the writer elliptically references), I can say with reasonable certainty that this is not the greatest issue facing college students. It's not even in ninth or tenth place. They could be writing about the indentured servitude of adjuncts or the corporatization of higher education, but instead they're writing out their anxieties about saying something awful and not getting a pass for it anymore. To be completely fair, most of them are paying exponentially more than you did. New dorm projects attract more students, see my reference to the corporatization of higher education above.

Oh ugh, really? The podcast ends with agreement that opinion modifiers should be more hidden from the player? I promise you, guys, that it'd be cool the first few times that your Sun King dies with no warning from a conspiracy led by his supposed best friend, and then never again. In a game about personal relationships, giving the player less ability to assess those relationships is not fun. How do you know if your ally will come to war with you if you don't know his opinion of you? Will we go back to EU3's "Likely/Maybe/Not Likely" trichotomy that Paradox was so proud of ditching for EU4? Or will we just have a "search out opinion" function attached to a character or an interface that the player will be obligated to spam for more efficient play? Well, there's historical accuracy and then historical plausibility. I lean towards the latter, most of the time, but there are always emergent events that tick me off. How many times has the Holy Roman Emperor inherited the kingdom England or Norway and that just gets sucked into their de jure lands, never to break free again? That's implausible.

Isn't any product in any market punished for asking a higher price for no other reason than their price? Certainly, a game at a particular price point doesn't need to be a certain thing, but it needs to be something, which I agree is not perfect, but the thing to criticize is capitalist economics as a whole, not consumer expectations in a certain market. I also think that, at least in the PC realm, the rise of Steam sales and deep discounts has lessened the effect of price in discussions of game quality, because it's known to be temporary. Still, games can also change drastically in content and presentation because of patches and DLC, so not reviewing an aspect of a game because it's potentially temporary seems like a bad idea overall.

Along with clyde's statement, that really helped me with what's truly troublesome about the "Kill all men" meme: its humor depends entirely on the assumption that we're talking about straight white men, which of course we are, because straight white men are the default human. If you lend it any more specificity, it becomes at best unfunny and at worse really offensive. It really is useless.

Two things: A pretty good interview with black fans of anime (apparently Piccolo is a favorite as a coded "black" character), and AMV Hell 7 (which is a year old now, but no one posted it in here yet)

I haven't listened through the entire podcast yet, but I do want to comment on something: I really hope that Paradox never makes the CK2 endgame like the EU4 endgame. External pushback to expansion makes a lot less sense with CK2's unique mechanics and I'm not a fan of the badboy dogpile anyway. What CK2 has that EU4 doesn't have, at least since the patch where they introduced core decay, is the ability for empires to disintegrate. It's not a zero-sum game, like in midgame EU4 where land is only lost by becoming part of a neighboring empire; land can be lost by becoming part of no empire, as outlying counties and duchies slip out from under a kingdom that no longer has the power to hold them. It's a cool mechanic and yet one that CK2 barely ever puts to good use. There are a few reasons for this: The power of kingdoms and empires make them too stable. The AI is automatically quite hesitant to take action against a higher title simply because the resources available to the latter (theoretical, at times, rather than practical) are so much higher. A county typically forms between one half and one fifth of a duchy, but the majority of kingdoms have somewhere close to a dozen duchies, which combines with the larger demesne and retinue of kings and emperors to make them flatly less vulnerable in AI calculations, even before more powerful allies are factored into the equation. The alterations to how vassal levies are calculated has helped a bit, but although the AI always loves just to plot against a player with a higher title, it's still very loath to take action because the scales have been tipped from the start. Speaking of plotting, factions still suck. Disaffected characters will join factions almost at random, so a mildly disliked ruler will have maybe a half-dozen factions with a couple of vassals in each. It feels implausible, both that slightly sore feelings would turn half of a kingdom's vassals against their king and that they can't even work together to decide on his replacement. CK2Plus and several other mods have made this a solved problem for years now, with independence, claimant, and crown authority factions tossed out in favor of several static "special interests" that demand higher crown authority, lower crown authority, different succession laws, and so on through scripting. It makes a king always have some pressure on him, rather than a good king never having any pressure and a bad king having unrelenting pressure. I also just honestly think it worked better when plots represented such things instead of factions, but that's never coming back. There's no danger of a kingdom disintegrating because of a poor heir for succession. The "realm size" mechanic that was introduced with the Charlemagne DLC is a good idea that is totally obviated by even basic competence with the game's systems. Sure, if you go over your realm size and your king dies, there's a (far too small) chance that some duchies will gain their independence, but averting that is trivial: drop your centralization, give away one of your demesne counties to a younger son, and then take it back once the title has passed on. Why the realm size penalty upon succession is counted via the dead man's stats and not the living heir's, I don't know, but there you go. Honestly, I miss The Winter King, a mod where there was a check to see whether an heir was "worthy" (through hitting a certain sum of stats and not having a certain few traits) and, if they weren't worthy, then a large minority of vassals would go independent. Sometimes, it would trigger a succession war instead, or simply destroy the title. In that mod, death was something to be dreaded and prepared for, maybe even by changing succession laws to avoid a bad heir, as opposed simply to a loss of the claims that the current character possesses. There's also just a defect in the way that CK2's simulation of feudalism works, because there's no reason for a ruler to have any relationship with his vassal's vassals. Not only does it allow for gamey exploits like kings imprisoning their dukes' counts for ransom without any consequence, but it protects kings and emperors from entire tiers of disgruntled vassals. No matter how evil a duke is, his vassals will never cause trouble for you by petitioning you to denounce him or rebelling against you for failing to do anything about him. In fact, it's good for an evil duke to have angry vassals, because they might overthrow him and replace him with one of their own, who'd presumably be more open to good relations. Emperors make it even worse, because even dukes cease to be a threat, more so if you shove them under vassal kings and reduce your vassal ranks to three or four characters who can be easily bribed or intimidated into happiness. See my first point and start all over again, I guess! Vassal relations are the place where I find myself missing the first Crusader Kings the most. I know that it's bound to be forgotten as a footnote, now that the sequel has met with some success, but it had parts that were better. The way it worked, a disgruntled vassal would occasionally get a "rebellious" trait, which gave them an overall stat boost and an opinion malus with their ruler. Think of it as the "Ambitious" trait, but with more mechanical effects. If enough vassals were rebellious or certain other sets of conditions were met, the ruler would get a trait called "realm duress" and the rebellious vassals would get individual events offering to let them start various kinds of civil wars, to be independent, seize the throne, or take land. Even if realm duress never happened, rebellious vassals were always given the chance at various random points in time and upon succession to stay loyal, slip out of the realm without a fight, or fight a war for independence to remove the ruler's claim to their lands. It did a much better job of simulating, for example, how the new Holy Roman Emperor always had to invade Italy to remind it that it was under his authority. I have no illusions that CK2 will ever have something like realm duress. It was always a deeply unpleasant ten or twenty years of time in the game that almost certainly spelled the end of your dynasty at that level of title, with the only mechanical benefit being a more plausibly dynamic map. Still, I wish at least that factions were more long-term things with static goals applying pressure to the players, which would combine with entry options to vassals of vassals and external allies of vassals to make them worth paying attention to beyond bribes and bullying. There are ways to make the endgame interesting, and they all involve making the act of ruling a large empire a balancing act that's likely to fall apart upon the death of its ruler, time and again.

I don't really have a holistic answer for you, but why is it alright to highlight a game's length and replayability, but not its price? Surely twelve hours means something different to everyone, and I've seen way too many games celebrated just for being two hundred hours long. Is longer always better? As I see it, here are multiple value propositions within a game, and I'm having trouble not interpreting a desire not to bring up price alone among them as much more than the typical Western hesitance to enter money into any conversation.

The thing is, there's literally no limit to the number of expressions in the English language, even if it stopped evolving tomorrow. We're not going to run out of stuff to say, so if someone says that something offends them, I generally cop to it. I have literally no words that I like saying so much that it's worth hurting someone's feelings to keep saying them, even if they're reaching or whatever. Like Argobot, I thought that "Kill all men" was funny several years ago, but it didn't have any legs at all, and now that someone's pointed out that the mock frustration of white feminists with all men has a slight resonance with the historical frustration of white racists with black men when framed in terms of murder, I'm not particularly sad to see it go.

I understand what you're saying, but I also don't want a reviewer with opinions on a game that they're reviewing as a value proposition to force themselves to review it from the artificial perspective of someone with infinite money and time. That makes the review less useful, even if I don't share the financial or personal situation of the reviewer themselves. Also, and I know people don't like this argument on a philosophical level, but you don't hear price coming into discussions of books or movies because books and movies typically cost as much as the cheapest game, with the vast majority of games almost an order of magnitude more expensive. For instance, if a showing of a certain movie cost sixty dollars or the equivalent, all around the world, for some reason, you can bet that a majority of reviews would mention it. Sixty dollars is not a trivial amount of money for most people, the way that a tenner for a movie ticket is.

Careful not to take off that hat...

I have to take breaks, too, not because I'm ever able to stop gaming the system, even when trying to roleplay, but because I have interest in playing only a small section of the CK2 world (mostly southern France and the Holy Roman Empire, as well as adjacent regions) and there's a limited number of interesting starts that I can burn myself out playing if I'm not careful. Really, what I want to see more than anything in the next installment of Crusader Kings is better-curated bookmarks outside of 1066 that are worthwhile to play. The other two "flagship" bookmarks, 867 and 769, are awful insofar as producing an outcome with even an remote historical plausibility, and all the post-1066 bookmarks are riddled with knee-slapping errors that simply shouldn't exist in a world with both the Europäische Stammtafeln and the "Medieval Lands" amateur prosopography project readily available. If I read about a medieval lord in a history book, I feel like I should be able to play him in the game, but unless he's a king or a major duke, good luck! Sigh.

To be fair, it's Adam Smith saying it, after a much vaguer quote from EU4 lead Tomas Johannson, but still...

God, this sentence drives me wild with excitement. A space 4X where a possible endgame is not supreme political and economic domination, but a more postmodern and observatory role? Jeez. I also feel a little sorry for Chris King, who left Paradox to make his own 4X, Galactic Inheritors. I feel like that hasn't got as much attention, and now maybe it won't get much more.

I'm going to be the truly awful speaker of Latin and say that, properly, it should be "Quis plumbabit ipsos plumbarios." I also enjoy that the phrase was originally coined to explain the difficulty of keeping your wife from cheating on you.

The last time I bought a game on release at full price was Total War: Rome 2, which has influenced my subsequent thinking on the subject. Sega is exceptionally bad with its DLC practices, though.

I'm excited to listen to this episode, especially because I haven't gotten the chance to buy or play this latest DLC. Personally, I'm of the opinion that the soft power of the steppes is an inconceivable thing to create in the CK2 engine, which is all about about the hard power of rank and rule in the feudal system, but I'll be just as happy to be wrong.

Yeah... At this point, I'm mostly just interested in how a "faithful" adaptation of a well-regarded manga made for a terrible anime, partly because they were trying to cover three chapters per episode with very little cut from the story but mostly because the two mediums are efficient at different way of conveying information and no effort was made to optimize for anime, instead just cutting some characterization and making a lot of the rest just informed attributes. After Jormungand, I think I've earned a nice comedy, maybe the second season of Railgun, but after that, I'll definitely watch Gundam 0080, if you can wait that long. We can even make it a spotlight anime for the podcast, if it's as good as you say.

Oh, of course they're not about Stan, but when a show's writing repeats a name so many times, its viewers tend to get the idea that they should know the name. It really wouldn't have been hard to replace some of the many instances of "Stan" with "one of my guys," but for some reason, a more "authentic" form of the dialogue was chosen.

I think they have a regular DLC schedule, but they don't have the specific entries planned in advance, instead relying on community feedback and emergent shortfalls in their feature set. I like the idea of DLC as responsive to the game's post-release impact, rather than content previously excised and doled out regardless of other factors. I also think that timing DLC with major patches, while sometimes problematic for stability and usability, helps to reinforce that the DLC and the patches are in a symbiotic relationship that the overwhelming majority of Paradox players appreciate.

I would, Gaizo, but I'm so trepidatious of where my entry point into massive franchises like Gundam should be... Yeah, the main problem with the anime is that it tries so hard to be about a globetrotting arms dealer and the wacky people with whom she has to deal, but it turns out in the end that it's really about the relationship between a diverse group of mercenaries and their boss. And... I don't know, I'm on board with either story, even though the latter is obviously more interesting, but the attempt to do both in the level of detail that I assume the manga has totally sinks the show. By the end, I badly need to know the face and personality of every single mercenary for the "band of brothers" thing to be sold to me, but instead we've wasted literally over a dozen episodes propping up antagonists like Scarecrow, Hex, and Bookman, who don't even figure into the overarching plot once we really get down to business. Hex literally comes and goes in the space of two episodes, which are entirely devoted to building and expanding her character at the expense of telling the audience anything about Koko or her bodyguards, even though the latter form the crux of the show's dramatic impact. It's almost unconscionable. Here we go, I'm going to try to name all of Koko's bodyguards, as well as their defining traits: Jonah: A child soldier from the Middle East, I think? Supposedly smart and preternaturally talented, but it's never seen in action. He hates weapons but uses weapons because...? Lehm: Tough, blonde American who's ex-Delta Force. Fatherly but sardonic, a natural mentor to Jonah. Formerly married to Chiquita with her creepy wide smile. Valmet: Ex-Special Forces from Finland, with a long pedigree. Huge boobs, gross "lesbian" crush on Koko. Shows a specialty with knives one time and never again. Lutz: Former cop. A sniper who doesn't really like killing. Gets shot in the butt a lot, which is meant to be funny. Wiley: A black American who's ex-Delta Force. Likes explosions and Lehm. Extremely unstable but no one seems to care. Ugo: Ex-mafia driver. A big man who likes cars. Considered the weakest link by assassins that one time. Tojo: Former Japanese intelligence officer. Smart...? Mao: Chinese something? I don't know. R: Italian? Elite? Except for Jonah, Lehm, and maybe Valmet, the three of whom dominate the various plot points, these people mean nothing to me. For the majority, I've written literally everything that I know about them after ten solid hours of anime-watching and it's still just the vaguest sketch. I couldn't care less if any of them happen to die or betray the rest, yet the anime desperately wants me to feel that tension anyway, given how many scenes there are of them sitting in a group and each offering their opinion. Too bad those scenes are totally unearned.

It might not be different to you, but it certainly feels different to me. When Assassin's Creed: Unity turned out to be such a bomb, Ubisoft cancelled its slate of planned DLC, didn't it? I'm not saying that, faced with disaster on a similar level, Paradox wouldn't maybe do the same, but it certainly seems that Paradox's reactive and development-focused DLC policy is a different kind of beast than the typical triple-A policy that has the next nine months of DLC planned from the start, nothing more and nothing less.

Listening to Chris' comment about how interesting it is for Stan's death to tempt viewers into seeing a pattern of serial killings when it's really something more grounded and pragmatic, I'm looking forward very much to this podcast's rewatch of the first season. One of the most striking things to me, watching it for the third time, is how much effort the writing of that season puts into pushing hints about Rust's possible culpability with the serial killings. Various things said by people who've been in contact with the Yellow King and Carcosa are repeated or anticipated by Rust, the vast majority of revelations in the case happen offscreen and are then reported to Marty by Rust himself, Rust repeatedly uses his authority as a cop to get barbiturates to help him sleep but possibly also to impair his memory and reduce anxiety, there's the entire frame story with its subtly garbled timeline... It's actually quite effective to watch, if you're able to ignore the fact that it's unsupported outside of the literal words of the dialogue. Really, it falls apart because McConaughey and presumably Fukunaga appear to be totally uninterested in pushing that angle. The lines are there, but for them to work, Rust has to come off as a character functionally indistinguishable from Reggie Ledoux, save for the respective sides of order and chaos for which they work. Instead, McConaughey drops the "anti" from "antichrist" in his performance and delivers Rust's lines like an actual messiah. It's much more entertaining, but I wonder what the first season of True Detective would have been like if I had doubted the innocence of Rust for even a moment... Also, the repeating list from this latest episode, for those who are interested: Most commentators have already made some variation of "The list is a flat circle," so go nuts.